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7 Getting Better

I almost titled this chapter “Getting Feedback,” but then I thought you’d skip it. Everyone wants to get better, but let’s be honest—not ev ery one wants feedback. Chances are, if you’re like me, you don’t want to inspect your teaching too closely, let alone invite someone else to do so. At least not yet. Some faculty members happily seek feedback in their more es-tablished, familiar courses, but they understandably want to get through a new course at least once before scrutinizing what is or isn’t working. When we teach outside our comfort zone, we are less likely to do informal assessments of students’ learning. Sure, we still do problem sets, exams, and papers, but we are less likely to ask, “What’s the muddiest point from today’s class?” or collect un-graded information about what students do and don’t under-stand. Why? At the most basic level, we spend so much time learn-ing the material and preparing for class that we don’t have the time to think about formative teaching evaluations. I often see this with new faculty. They have ev ery intention of collecting feedback from students and eagerly grab all the handouts and

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sample midterm evaluations at new faculty orientation, but once they get in the classroom, they are too busy. I also suspect that they don’t want to add to their sense of feeling overwhelmed. They promise to collect feedback next year, when they have things under control. With more experienced faculty, time may not be so much of an issue (in part because se nior faculty are typically teaching only one new course). But more experienced faculty are often concerned that asking for student input will make them appear less competent. After all, these professors are acutely aware of how much they don’t know in this periphery course, and they’d rather not look too insecure. Just like their junior colleagues, they would rather ask if ev ery thing is going well once they are pretty sure that yes, ev ery thing is going well. These positions are understandable. There is only so much you can do, and no one wants to increase their sense of vulner-ability. But getting some feedback from your students is one of the best things you can do when you’re teaching something new. It helps you become a better teacher more quickly. In this chap-ter I present two kinds of assessment activities—activities to evaluate how students are experiencing the course and activities to assess what your students do and do not understand.1 I also suggest language for framing the feedback pro cess so students see it as evidence of your credibility, not your fallibility.

Why It’s So Important to Assess Your Teaching The

First Time

Given that most instructors want to wait until they teach a course a second or third time before they assess it, I know I’m in for a hard sell. (If you’re already convinced, you can skip ahead to the next section.)

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The best argument for doing assessments the first time you teach a course is that a higher percentage of students will suc-ceed. Some students will be successful learners regardless of what you do in class, and we all love those students, but it’s the other students you need to hear from. John Bean, a professor of En glish at Seattle University, explained: “What you’re really try-ing to do is fig ure out what works for some students and what works for others and which students you’re missing entirely.” Because it’s your first time through the course, you don’t have a reference point for which students you might be missing. Are students asking too few questions? Is it normal for half the class to do poorly on the first exam? Then there’s the issue of student misconceptions. As faculty, we often assume that once we’ve taught the correct information, it automatically replaces any incorrect or naïve knowledge that students have been harboring. Sometimes it does, but often those misconceptions can coexist quite peacefully with the cor-rect knowledge.2 To replace misconceptions, we ac tually have to draw attention to them. But it can take years of teaching a topic before faculty realize which misconceptions are interfering with students’ understanding. Rather than grading two hundred ex-ams to discover the most confusing concepts, ask students about them the first time you teach the course. If you do some small assessments, it’s easier to gauge when students are bored or lost. When you’re teaching something you know well, you can multitask: you can derive an equation on the board or lead a case study discussion and still notice that students are staring back with blank faces. When you’re teach-ing something you don’t know well, your attention is focused more on what you’re doing than on what your students are do-ing. You’re relying more heavily on your notes than you ordi-narily would, or you’re paying more attention to the time. All


of this self- monitoring diverts your attention from subtle stu-dent cues you might ordinarily notice. (Of course, if a student falls asleep you’re going to notice, but there were probably more subtle cues twenty minutes ago that you were losing that stu-dent.) If you can find out which concepts or authors are most con-fusing to students, you can also alleviate some of your own anxi-ety about of fice hours. I interviewed faculty who dreaded of fice hours for their periphery courses. One engineering professor said that those one- on- one conversations were especially dif fi-cult because he couldn’t anticipate which questions students were going to bring to him, and he couldn’t postpone an answer with the student sitting right there. But if you do assessments periodically, you’ll have a better sense of which topics students are likely to bring to your door, and you can prepare beforehand. (Incidentally, when a student stumps you in of fice hours, it’s also reasonable to say, “Good question—let’s go back and take a look at the book.” You’re showing him how you go about figur-ing out the answer.) One last reason to do periodic assessments is that it can be hard on faculty when students fail. And it may be even harder on you when students fail one of your periphery courses. This may sound counterintuitive because you might care more about students’ success in topics that are near and dear to your heart. But in courses where you know the material well, you can prob-ably find evidence that a failing student didn’t try hard enough or didn’t use the right resources. As Codrina Popescu, the chem-istry professor from Ursinus College, explains, she knows what she needs to do in chemistry to ensure students’ success. She knows which concepts and skills will be essential later, and if a student is struggling with these critical issues, she can make an effort to steer that student back on track. But if a student fails

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her general education course, she feels guilty. It’s harder to be sure that she did enough: “If I’d been the expert, I would have done a better job. I would have detected the problems students were having, and those students would have done better.” Admittedly, a midterm course evaluation or a few “muddiest point” exercises won’t prevent determined students from failing your course. But if you have been taking the class’s temperature periodically, you’ll be able to make regular course corrections and rest easier knowing, in the end, that you did all you could to support your students’ success.

Collecting Feedback You Can Use

Your priority is to collect feedback that you’ll be able to use. Usable feedback comes in reasonable amounts; it’s neither too much nor too little, and it focuses on changes that are within your control. I have three pieces of advice for soliciting usable feedback.

1. Plan Your Feedback Strategy Early in the Course

When you’re teaching a course outside of your expertise, the workload keeps increasing as you march steadily toward the end of the term. If you tell yourself that you’ll fig ure out an assess-ment strategy in week five or six, it’s very unlikely to happen. If you’re planning to do a midterm evaluation, find an evaluation form you’d like to use early in the term (preferably before the course begins) and make a note on your calendar as to when you plan to administer it. If you’re thinking of doing regular small assessments, begin them early in the course—in week one or two so that you establish a culture of feedback for you and your students. Once you see how helpful the pro cess can be, you’re more likely to seek feedback again.


2. Don’t Collect More Feedback Than You Can Handle

A new business instructor once came to my of fice, harried and flushed, and pulled out a dog- eared, two- inch stack of evalua-tions from his briefcase. He had distributed a four- page midterm evaluation to a class of around one hundred students, and he wanted to know what to do with it all. I just sat there looking at the tattered stack for a few awkward seconds. Almost two weeks had passed since the students had completed the evaluations, and he’d been carrying the stack around with him; he had been too overwhelmed preparing class each day to read them (plus I’m sure he was just as daunted as I was by the towering stack of student handwriting). Be modest. Undershoot when you ask for feedback. You can always ask again later.

3. Report Back to Students on What You’ve Changed

Remember to close the feedback loop by letting students know what you’ve learned from their comments and what changes, if any, you plan to make in response. If you don’t say anything, students will wonder whether you’ve read their feedback.3 They may decide that the whole feedback activity was pointless, which makes it dif fi cult to solicit constructive input from them again. Some faculty rationalize that as long as they implement some of the changes that students request, they don’t need to make any announcements or draw attention to those changes. An announcement somehow seems over the top. I’m not sug-gesting that you need to wear a crown for the day, but if you don’t say anything, students might not notice that anything has changed. Or some students will notice the changes but won’t realize that they were prompted by someone’s feedback. You may as well get credit for being the responsive and receptive

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teacher that you ac tually are. And students will learn that con-structive feedback is worth giving.

Classroom Assessment Activities

I’m including two kinds of assessments here: strategies for as-sessing students’ experience in the course, and strategies for as-sessing what students do and don’t understand. In all these ac-tivities, but especially when students are describing their experiences in the course, let students respond anonymously. You’re probably not the type to let a negative comment sway your grading, but your students can’t be sure of that.

Assessing Students’ Experience in the Course

The One- Point Raise I learned this assessment technique from a friend who is a clinical psychologist. She uses a similar technique with her cli-ents. In the first part of the activity, you ask each student to rate an experience on a scale of 1 to 10, and in the second part, you ask them what would raise their score by 1 point. You collect their written feedback and read it outside of class. It’s very sim-ple but surprisingly powerful. Begin by asking students to get out a blank sheet of paper. If you’ve prepared for this ahead of time, you can distribute a handout with the question written at the top. Pick an aspect of the course for which you would like some feedback—maybe it’s the clarity of today’s class or maybe it’s the interest level in a topic—and ask students to rate the course on that dimension. “Rate how interesting today’s class was for you on a scale of 1 to 10.” Next, de fine the two endpoints of the scale so that students have a common understanding of what a 1 means compared


with a 10. Use ex tremes in de fin ing these endpoints so that stu-dents see them as widely different and are encouraged to use the full range. Don’t forget your sense of humor: “So a ‘1’ would mean that today’s class was so painfully boring that you wish you had gone to the dentist’s instead of coming to class, and a ‘10’ would mean that today’s class was so fascinating that you would choose to re- watch it, in its entirety, on YouTube.” Some students will smile and others will roll their eyes, but you’ve got their attention. Chances are you won’t get many 1s or 10s in your ratings, but you’ll know that a 9 is very high praise indeed. (I once had a small evening course in which two students gave the class a 10. Both of them said that they would stay in class a full hour longer because it was so valuable. I was delighted, but one of them later admitted that her ride wasn’t coming for an hour anyway.) Once students have jotted down a number, ask them, “Now, what would raise your score by 1 point?” Some students will identify something that was under your control—they wish you had written more on the board, spent more time discussing a video, and so on. But some students will identify something that was entirely their responsibility. I’ve had students indicate that their score would have gone from a 5 to a 6 if they had simply gotten more sleep the night before, or from an 8 to a 9 if they had fin ished the reading. Because the survey is anonymous, stu-dents generally have nothing to lose by being honest. I once did this activity in a freshman seminar and a student wrote that his score would have gone up a point “if I had ended the phone call with my girlfriend earlier last night.” In five minutes, you’ve quickly and effectively gathered infor-mation that offers insight into the classroom dynamics for that day. Best of all, you can see how much or how little was within your control.

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Early or Midterm Course Evaluation Handing out a final course evaluation form that’s tailored to your course at the end of the term can provide invaluable feed-back on what did and didn’t work. Handing out an adapted ver-sion of that same evaluation form during the first few weeks of your course, when there is still ample time to make changes based on students’ input, is pretty close to brilliant. In one fell swoop, you can find ways to improve the learning environment. You can ask for feedback on some part of the course that’s re-quiring a lot of work for you (maybe you don’t need to invest that much effort after all), and you can show students that you care about their learning. In many cases, you can improve the course or your teaching before it’s over. When you begin to search for or develop a midterm evalua-tion for a course that’s outside your expertise, you want a form that

provides some positive feedback (you deserve some reas-• surance on what’s going well);ensures you receive some suggestions for improvement;• focuses on dimensions of the course that you’re willing to • change; andis easy to summarize or tabulate (after all, you’re still short • on time).

I know many faculty who use an open- ended course evaluation with three or four simple questions, such as “What strengthens your learning in this course?” or “What hinders your learning in this course?” One advantage of open- ended questions is that they can be prepared quickly: you can type up a few questions and create a midterm evaluation in five minutes. The time you save in creating the form, however, can come back to haunt you


when you have to identify the themes in students’ feedback. The twenty- five students in your class may go in twenty- five dif-ferent directions. And many of their comments may concern things that you’re not willing or even able to change, such as the time the course is offered, the amount of reading you’ve re-quired, or the monotony of your voice. (I know at least one very tall, se nior male professor who would strongly disagree that one has control over the timbre of one’s voice.) To avoid these problems, use a midterm evaluation that fo-cuses student feedback. If you use an evaluation form with close- ended questions (that is, questions that limit students’ re-sponses to predetermined categories), the feedback is easier to tabulate, plus you’ve directed students’ attention to those parts of the course where you genuinely want their input. You can find a va ri ety of good forms online, but my favorite approach, particularly when you’re teaching a course for the first time and you want to be sure you receive some encouraging feedback, is to use a two- column form. (See the sample in Ap-pendix D.) The heading of the first column reads, “I like the way the instructor . . .” and is then followed by a list of different practices, such as “encourages students to ask questions,” “uses visual aids effectively,” and so on. The heading at the top of the second column reads, “I would like the instructor to . . .” fol-lowed by a list of the same practices from column one with sug-gestions for how they might be improved. So this list might be-come “I would like the instructor to encourage students to ask more / fewer questions (Circle one)” or “use visual aids more of-ten.” The two- column form is quick to administer in class or online, and it’s wonderfully easy to tabulate. You can make direct deci-sions about what to keep and what to change based on the bal-ance of checkmarks in the two columns. If 80 percent of the

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students in the class say they would like to spend more time on discussion and only 10 percent say they want less time on dis-cussion (and 10 percent skip the question altogether), the deci-sion is simple: more time on discussion. But in almost ev ery course, the students are split on at least one issue. Half the stu-dents want more discussion and half want more lecture. When that happens, I follow my preference, which is typically to keep the sta tus quo if I think it’s working. In addition to the time savings and clarity that this two- column form provides, it also shows students how to give constructive feedback on teaching. Such modeling will help them when it comes time to fill out their final course evaluations. Instead of simply writing, “I loved / hated this class” on the final evaluation (which might stir your emotions but doesn’t help you make ped-agogical decisions), students can draw on some of the language from the midterm evaluation and write, “I loved this class be-cause the instructor encouraged students to ask lots of ques-tions; we covered new topics that weren’t in the readings; and she showed the cutest slides of her dog.” Or the disgruntled stu-dent might write, “I hated this class because the instructor al-lowed too many questions that had nothing to do with the read-ing. Ditch the dog.” You may not want to receive that last comment from the disgruntled student, but it lets you know what to consider changing. It’s much more informative than just “Screw this course,” a comment a dear colleague recently re-ceived. If you do use the two- column form, be sure to include only questions about practices you’re willing to modify. It can be mis-leading to ask students for feedback on an aspect of the course that would be very dif fi cult for you to change. (Remember my friend with the baritone voice.) I have to admit that I usually include a few open- ended ques-


tions on the back of the two- column form. Partly this is because I’m a sucker for feedback. But there’s a more strategic reason for asking those open- ended questions. There may be a problem with the course that you don’t realize. Once students have of-fered feedback on the issues you prioritize, they can raise a new issue in the open- ended questions. You may be thinking, “Ah, but that defeats the purpose—I was trying to save time by excluding the open- ended questions.” In my experience, and I’ve seen this form used in dozens of classes, students write much less on the open- ended questions once they have had a chance to check off some behaviors they like or dislike. When students make comments at the end, they typically explain why they checked something on the first side of the sheet (which is fine because you were seeking feedback on that practice anyway) or, less often, they inform you of some-thing you didn’t realize was an issue. Either way, the feedback is more directed and ef fi cient than if you gave them only the open- ended questions.

“Five- Year” Question I learned about a cle ver assessment strategy from Myra Strober, the labor economist from Stanford University. Myra’s a professor at both the Graduate School of Business and the School of Education, so she’s taught a wide range of classes, ev ery thing from “Women’s Employment” to “Economics of Education.” In all her courses, she asks the same question on the last day of class: “Five years from now, what will you remember from this course?” She asks the class as a group because she wants to hear students’ answers, and she wants to be sure the students hear one another. Some students comment on the pro cess: “I’ll re-member that this is the course where I got to know what my

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classmates really think.” Others comment on what this course means for their real lives: “I learned the kinds of questions to ask before I take a job.” Their answers are meaningful, often personal. And the activity is a powerful way to end the course.

Assessing Students’ Understanding

If you like to stand in front of the ice cream counter and have thirty or forty different flavors of ice cream to choose from, then you’ll love the book Classroom Assessment Techniques by Thomas Angelo and Patricia Cross.4 It features fifty creative techniques for assessing student learning. If you’re sat is fied to have some-one else narrow down the menu, then this next section is for you. I’ve selected a few favorite strategies from Angelo and Cross’s popular book, and I also include a few of my own. I’ve picked assessment strategies that require the least amount of preparation and the least amount of expertise in the subject mat-ter.

Muddiest Point This is one of the simplest and quickest assessments you can do to determine where students are running into comprehen-sion problems. Ask students to get out a sheet of paper and write down their answer to the following question: “What is the mud-diest point in today’s class?” (or the muddiest point in today’s discussion, the readings for this week, the lab due Friday, and so on). You can read the feedback during break or after class and then address students’ sticking points. Students may be confused by a concept that’s relatively rudimentary, which tells you that they’re probably missing more complex concepts as well. They may be confused by an example that’s not important, in which case you can reassure them not to worry. Either way, you’ll now


see which concepts require extra review. You’ll often discover that students need more help with the basic concepts, concepts that you probably understand well, rather than the slippery nu-ances of an advanced concept that you’re still learning. It’s not that students understand the advanced concepts either, but they often need more help securing the basic concepts than you real-ize. The muddiest point exercise can be wonderfully reassuring if you’re feeling out of your league as the instructor.

Clarity Grid This activity is essentially a more elaborate version of the muddiest point exercise in which you ask students to tell you which parts of a concept make sense and which parts are still causing trouble. Give students a sheet of paper with three la-beled columns. At the top of the page, name a concept or term that students have recently learned. For a class in neu ro psy chol-o gy, I might use “prosopagnosia,” an inability to recognize faces. Label the first column “What makes sense to me about this con-cept,” the second, “Why it makes sense to me,” and the third, “What I’m still working to understand.” The students’ task is to complete the sheet on the basis of what they can recall about the concept. Each column reveals something important about students’ un-derstanding. The first column reveals a potential disconnect be-tween what you taught and what students learned. What “makes sense” to your students may be accurate and complete—in which case students successfully learned what you taught—but in some cases, what makes sense to your students may be incor-rect or incomplete, revealing what they have either missed or misunderstood. In my example on prosopagnosia, the student might write, “It means people can see faces but they can’t recog-nize faces. It’s pretty rare and results from brain damage on the

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right side of the brain.” This is generally correct but lacks neces-sary details, such as the exact area of the brain affected. The second column, “Why it makes sense to me” usually re-veals the assumptions behind students’ reasoning. Students may make accurate statements in the first (“What”) column but offer incorrect or misleading reasons in the second (“Why”) column. In my example, the student might note, “It makes sense to me that people can see something but not understand what they see. It’s like when I look at Chinese characters and can’t make sense of them.” He is comparing an inability to recognize faces to an inability to read Chinese. This is faulty reasoning—pre-sumably the student could learn to read Mandarin (with dedi-cated time and effort), but most people with prosopagnosia can never learn to recognize faces again once they’ve lost the ability, despite years of trying and often to the dismay of their husbands or wives whom they no longer recognize. The last column is a modi fied version of the muddiest point. By framing it as “What you’re still working to understand,” you convey a sense of hope that students can still master the issue. It also conveys the subtle but meaningful message that concepts in the course will take work and effort to understand. For example, the student writing about prosopagnosia might wonder if a per-son with this disorder is upset by the fact that he can’t recognize anyone, or if he avoids crowds. The activity also offers insight into how students are engaging with the concept. I once had a student write, “So what does he see when he looks at someone? Just a smiley face?” I had never thought of it that way. His re-sponse prompted a fantastic discussion of how we might experi-ence the world differently if we had this impairment. Another nice thing about this activity is that you can create the three- column sheet long before the course begins. When you pass out the form in class, simply tell students which concept to


write at the top. Because you can prepare the activity in ad-vance, it can be part of your “Emergency Assessment Kit,” dis-cussed in Chapter 4.

“Survey Says” Although this activity is named after the popular phrase from the 1970s game show Family Feud, you don’t have to survey any-one (or listen to any hokey game show music). In this activity, offer a popular view on an issue and ask students to comment on this view in writing. In an ecology class, you might offer a commonly held view about farming, such as, “Eating organic food is one of the best things you can do for the environment because it supports low- impact farming.” Or in an education class, you might offer the widespread belief “The No Child Left Behind Act is an unfair extension of federal laws over schools.”5 Whatever statement you make, follow it with a question: “Given what you know now, what do you think of this view?” Since you’re not an expert in the field, you may only be famil-iar with popular views of some topics—you might even have shared some of those views just a few weeks earlier. Or you might find it hard to generate “commonly held views” because you’re so overwhelmed. A quick web search on Google can yield a wealth of ideas. Try combining the topic of interest, such as “organic food,” with phrases like “widespread belief,” “popular misunderstanding,” “common concern,” or, and this might seem strange, “five myths.” (For some reason, journalists like to offer myths in herds of five.) Whatever the popular view, have it writ-ten out so that students can refer back to it as they write. Once again, you can also prepare copies of this activity before teaching the course and keep them in your Emergency Assess-ment Kit (see Chapter 4). Simply pick a commonly held view

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that students could address at any point in the course. If you do this activity before you address an issue in class, it can help you identify common misunderstandings.

Directed Paraphrasing This activity is taken from Angelo and Cross’s book Classroom Assessment Techniques, and it’s ideal for faculty who are teaching outside of their expertise. If you’ve ever had to write for a non-technical audience, you know that the ability to paraphrase a complex or technical concept into layman’s terms is a valuable skill. It’s also a skill that students don’t often practice because they are typically writing for you, the professor, whom they know (or at least believe) is an expert. In this activity, students are asked to restate a concept as if they were explaining it to a spe cific audience with a de fined set of interests. In an accounting course, you might set up the fol-lowing scenario: “Imagine that you work for a large accounting firm. A national conference of forensic investigators and detec-tives is being held downtown this year, and you’ve been invited to be part of an expert panel on fraud and fi nan cial misconduct. Your job is to prepare a four- to five- minute explanation of how accountants can determine whether someone has ‘cooked the books’ in language that will make sense to detectives and FBI agents.” You’re probably thinking, “That’s lovely, but I’m pressed for time.” You can always do a quick search online to find some di-rected paraphrasing activities. They already exist for many aca-demic disciplines and courses. If you’d like to create your own but are having trouble thinking of opening scenarios, here are two that can easily be adapted to different courses and disci-plines:


You’ve applied for a job as a ______________ for the next

______________ movie. They liked your application and have

called you for an interview. The person doing the hiring says, “I

see that you’ve taken a course in ______________. How will a

background in that make you a better member of our crew?”

[Fill in the blanks to suit your needs. In an En glish course, a stu-

dent could be applying for a job as a scriptwriter and need to

explain how postmodernism will help him write a better script

for the next Batman movie. A robotics student could be asked

to be a technical consultant for the next Pixar film.]

You’ve been asked to help write part of a web-page advertise-

ment for a week-long retreat. The retreat is titled

“______________” and is aimed at well-paid, well-educated

business professionals who don’t have a background in

______________. Write a one-paragraph description that intro-

duces the concept of ______________ to this audience and will

motivate them to sign up for this retreat. [Music students could

explain “eurhythmics” for a “Find the Musician Within” retreat.

Agriculture students could explain “principles of crop rotation”

for “A Farmer’s Way: Growing Your Best Life.”

I know this seems a bit like Mad Libs, but these templates are surprisingly flex i ble. Why did I claim that this activity is ideal for non- experts? You’re asking students to write to a non- expert audience, so this is one instance where your lack of expertise can offer a rich range of experiences. What questions might a non- expert, like yourself, have about the topics in your course? Why should a non- expert care? You might be delighted and persuaded by stu-dents’ answers. Although I’ve featured several activities here, assessment

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strategies are sprinkled throughout this book. You may have al-ready seen the activities in Chapter 6 under “The Easy Part: Learning about Your Students.” In addition, several of the ac-tive learning strategies in Chapter 5 are designed to indicate where students are getting stuck in the material (activities such as “Sequence Reconstruction,” “Peer Instruction,” and “Category Build ing”).

Bringing in a Colleague to Assess Your Teaching

I know the title of this section might make you shudder. You want me to invite someone into a class where I don’t know what I’m doing? I don’t have a sadistic streak, I promise. I’m writing this section because most faculty do not take this route, but as I was doing my interviews, the faculty who did voluntarily invite supportive colleagues into their periphery classrooms found it extremely helpful. Without any prompting from me, they said it was a piece of advice they would offer other content novices. Whom should you invite? Go with the person who will create the least amount of stress for you. (When I asked junior faculty in my interviews, they said they wouldn’t invite a department chair or a tenured member of their own department. That would make them much too nervous, and they wouldn’t want that per-son judging their teaching abilities on the basis of this early snapshot.) If you found a supportive ally outside of your depart-ment, as suggested in Chapter 3, that person would be a great choice because they have already been supporting you behind the scenes. They know some of the challenges you face. A col-league from your teaching center may be another nonthreaten-ing option; most centers have policies to ensure that your teach-ing conversations remain con fi den tial. That can be a relief when


you want to confide that you’re nervous about the next part of the course—the topic never made sense to you when you were a student, and you’re not sure you can do it justice now, either. A friendly face in the classroom can help assess your teaching in two ways: the colleague can do a classroom observation or, if trained, conduct a Small Group Instructional Diagnosis (SGID). I’ll describe how to do each of these in a way that maximizes the bene fits for you and minimizes the stress.

Classroom Observation

A classroom observation can be extremely helpful because your colleague can look for things that you’re probably too pre-occupied to notice. When are students taking notes and when do they stop? Is there someone in the class who looks ready to par-tic i pate but needs some encouragement? Do you look at your watch too often? To increase your comfort level and ensure that you and your colleague are on the same page, I suggest doing the classroom observation in three steps.

Step 1: Meet with your colleague a few days before class to discuss the skills you’re working on as a teacher. If you can tell her what to prioritize—whether it’s your pacing, handling of students’ questions, use of PowerPoint, ability to talk over a loud radiator, whatever—your colleague will be able to focus her at-tention and provide more useful feedback. You can also let your colleague know if you’ll be explaining a particularly dif fi cult concept so she can help you assess your explanation. (Surpris-ingly, faculty often skip this first step of setting priorities for the observation. But I find that it makes the observation much less stressful for you because you and your colleague are working together on your priorities.)

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Step 2: Your colleague visits your classroom.

Step 3: You and your colleague sit down to discuss your re-spective observations of the class. You can assess whether this was a representative class and what did and didn’t go as ex-pected. Your colleague can let you know what she observed with respect to your priorities. She might also ask about other obser-vations that weren’t necessarily on the agenda but that she found interesting. She might want to know why you made cer-tain choices and how often you do certain things. Do you usu-ally break students into small groups or tell stories about gradu-ate school? Remember that she may be looking for new ideas to improve her own teaching. Just be sure that this conversation occurs within a few days of the class itself. That can be dif fi cult when you’re so busy preparing for class, but if you wait too long, you’ll find it harder to reconstruct the details of what happened on a particular class day (for example, what exactly did you say that agitated that one student?) and the pro cess will be less useful.

Small Group Instructional Diagnosis (SGID)

This is simpler than it sounds. And it’s so helpful. If a campus offered this to ev ery newly hired instructor, it should be listed as a faculty bene fit, right up there with free photocopying. The SGID, or “Midterm Class Interview,” as it’s sometimes known, is a structured group interview pro cess that’s usually of-fered midway through a course. The basic idea is that a facilita-tor helps students identify those aspects of the course that sup-port their learning and those aspects that could be improved. Students collaboratively create feedback that helps you, the in-structor, see the course from their perspective.


You’ll need a facilitator for this activity because you have to leave the room for fif teen to twenty minutes. Students will be more open during the SGID if their feedback is anonymous. If you’re in the room when students are offering suggestions, they will hesitate to say that you talk too fast or that your examples are outdated. They certainly won’t tell you that they only do half the readings. A person needs some training to facilitate an SGID smoothly, so contact the teaching center or professional development of fice on your campus to learn if anyone is trained in conducting these interviews. If you’ve never done an SGID, you might be thinking that this activity is essentially the same as conducting a written midterm evaluation. There are defi nitely similarities. But the advantage of the SGID is that students have a facilitated conversation about the course, and they get a chance to correct one another. I’ve conducted about three dozen SGIDs, and in more than half of them, a student discovers that he is alone in his negative view. For example, the student who loudly complains that the read-ings are boring discovers that he’s the only one who feels that way. Or a student who says that the feedback on the first draft of her paper was cryptic might learn that the instructor provided a handout explaining the codes he used. Students can be surpris-ingly quick to correct one another. Some faculty cringe at the thought of this activity, so I know it may not be for you. Fair enough. But let me address the most common concerns I hear. Instructors are often worried that stu-dents will say cruel things or that having a conversation will unify the students against the instructor. But I’ve been conduct-ing SGIDS for eight years in two different institutions, and in my experience, just the opposite occurs. Students are rarely cruel in an SGID—they typically word their comments carefully and sensitively, unless they are looking for a laugh. Moreover, a

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skilled facilitator will help students reword complaints into con-structive suggestions. As for unifying the students against you, in most cases, students find that the SGID is a positive experi-ence that endears them to their instructor because that instruc-tor cared enough to get their feedback. In small classes, instruc-tors often tell me later that discussions were more animated immediately following the SGID activity. In large classes, as long as the instructor responds to the feedback, a few students will usually comment on the final course evaluation that the “mid-term activity” was proof that the instructor truly cares. It always surprises me that students don’t realize that you care sooner, but somehow this activity sends the message home.

Students’ Perspective: Enhancing Your Credibility Rather

Than Detracting from It

Some faculty members are concerned that asking for feedback will make them appear less competent. They worry that it will be like wearing a sign around their neck announcing, “I don’t know what I’m doing.” Instructors who regularly conduct assessments in their classes will tell you that a good assessment only adds to their credibility rather than detracting from it. If you show your commitment to improving students’ learning and the environment in which they learn, you will see positive results. The research shows that faculty who collect midterm feedback and who make changes to improve their teaching on the basis of that feedback see in-creases in their ratings on the end- of- course evaluations. An in-structor’s sensitivity and responsiveness to students’ prog ress correlate strongly with students’ final ratings of the instructor—in fact, they rated fifth of seventeen factors in one literature re-view. Students also reported liking the subject matter more after


their instructors had responded to midterm feedback. Clearly, students are receptive to assessments when they’re done well.6

So, how do you do an assessment well? I have six suggestions.

1. Frame the activity as your commitment to offering the best course possible. When you introduce the activity, emphasize sev-eral key points:

Your goal is to improve the course and your teaching while • the students are still taking the course. The concrete and constructive feedback students provide during the course allows you to achieve that goal, whereas the final course evaluations help next year’s students.You want to hear what’s working well and what could be • improved. If you know what’s working for most students, you can be sure to preserve those successful components as you consider other possible changes.Promise to report back to students on what you learn.•

2. Explain why you won’t be making certain changes. Some fac-ulty hesitate to ask students how to improve a course because they are concerned that students will ask for unreasonable things. It’s true. Students do ask for unreasonable things. And you retain the right to decide which proposed changes are good changes and which proposed changes con flict with the learning out comes for the course. Rest assured, you don’t give up those rights simply by asking students for their perspective and sug-gestions. To maintain your credibility, however, you need to address the proposed changes you are making as well as the changes you’re not making. You don’t have to respond to ev ery bizarre request—

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one student may suggest that you bring bagels to class because it’s too early for them to get breakfast on their own. (I’d proba-bly make a joke about the con ve nience of Pop Tarts, but you could always just let this one drop.) But when you receive a clus-ter of legitimate requests around a practice that you’re not will-ing to change, you need to let students know why. Let’s consider the students’ workload, the inevitable com-plaint in most classes. As you may recall from Chapter 6, stu-dents spend on average only thirteen to fourteen hours a week doing the work for all their classes combined, so chances are that whatever you’ve assigned, it’s more than they want to do. When you ask for student feedback, they ask for a lighter read-ing load. Maybe you are willing to cut one of the readings—par-ticularly if you’re having trouble keeping up with the readings yourself. But most instructors are reluctant to do so. You’ve sought the advice of experts on the topic (at least you’ve looked at some syllabi online), and you’ve chosen each reading to ad-dress your big questions. When you respond to students’ feed-back, you can explain why you’re staying with what’s on the syllabus. But you can also let students know that you’ve heard them, and if possible, you want to work with them to find other ways to make the workload manageable. Could you reduce the number of homework assignments instead? Could you discuss reading strategies, explaining when to skim and when to read ev ery word?7 By explaining why a change is unreasonable (and offering alternative solutions when possible) you show respect for the students and clarify that the choices for the course were carefully made.

3. Don’t ask for feedback ev ery class. I know some people can do this and make it work, but it’s not the strategy I would rec-ommend for ev ery one. It’s particularly problematic if you’re


struggling with time or con fi dence. Collecting written feedback ev ery day creates a time problem because you’ve got to read and think about that feedback after each class. If you collect feed-back ev ery day but don’t get around to reading it, suddenly two weeks have slipped by and students haven’t seen any changes based on the last three times you asked for feedback. It’s like crying wolf. The next time you ask for students’ input on some-thing, their comments are likely to be apathetic or insulting, which is no help at all. Collecting feedback in ev ery class, particularly feedback on students’ experience in the course, is also a mistake if your con-fi dence is wavering. As Myra Strober observed, “You need a strong stomach when you ask students to evaluate your teach-ing. Students’ comments will be contradictory. Some will be just plain nasty. And some will be off- topic—they might say some-thing about your clothes.” Most of us can handle a smattering of contradictory advice or the occasional random comment about our clothes, but few of us want to deal with it ev ery week.

4. Don’t ask for feedback in the last five minutes of class. The default for most of us is to do an assessment in the last five min-utes of class. It makes sense—you’ve managed to get through as much material as you can and students can comment on the full class session they just sat through. That’s exactly the problem. Chances are the students don’t want to sit anymore. They want to pack up and get to their next class or get their next espresso at Starbucks. You’ll receive more thoughtful feedback with more thorough comments if you ask for feedback at a time when the only other alternative is more teaching from you. I usually ask for feedback in the first ten minutes or midway through class.

5. Get all students’ input on major changes that are proposed. Let’s say that on a midterm evaluation students tell you that the num-

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ber one thing you could do to improve the course is to eliminate the final exam. To make up for the lost points, they ask you to increase how much the last paper is worth. They make a good argument—most courses in the department offered at the 400- level don’t have final exams—and you were dreading the long stint of exam- grading right before the holiday break any-way. Before you make any decisions, discuss the issue with the en-tire class to find out what problems might arise if you make this major change. Ideally, take a vote. Some students may be stron-ger at test- taking than at paper- writing, so they may have been counting on the final exam for weeks to keep their grade afloat. It would be unfair to them to change the plan midstream. If you take a vote, know what options you’re willing to consider: does the vote need to be unanimous for you to cancel the final exam? If three or four students still want to take the exam but most students want to increase their grade on the last paper, would you be willing to create an exam for that small group of hold-outs?

6. Don’t reissue the syllabus five times. Revising and reissuing the course calendar once on the basis of something important you learn from your students (and preferably after the vote you just took in class) is a fine strategy. And if you have a good rap-port with your class, you can probably revise and reissue the syllabus a second time without too much discord. But don’t reis-sue the syllabus ev ery other week. Too many changes make you appear disor ga nized and make students nervous.

Asking students for their feedback can make faculty feel vul-nerable. We tend to fear the worst. But we also tend to work harder than necessary when we teach outside of our expertise. Other people can see that, but it’s not as obvious to us because


all we can see is how much more work there is to do. Having a trusted colleague visit your class or asking students to do a quick assessment exercise can reassure you that things are going bet-ter than you realized. Well- structured feedback can help you re-lax about the parts of the class where your preparations are just fine and help you focus your energy where students need it most.

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